“If our faith is such that it is destroyed by force of argument, then let it be destroyed; for it will have been proved that we do not possess the truth.”
Clement of Alexandria, late 2nd Century

Monday, June 27, 2016

The bell curve of belief

Where do you fall on the bell curve of belief?

I've been reading apologetics again, and midway through reading yet another argument about the fine tuning of the universe, I suddenly realised that all apologists are to be found right at the end of the bell curve of belief. And for the most part, all anti-apologists are to be found at the other end of the bell curve of belief. People in the middle, or within a couple of standard deviations of the middle of the curve, don't write apologetics books (or anti-apologetics ones).

One end of the bell curve is absolute and total belief in God. The other end of the bell curve is absolute and total belief in naturalism, with no possibility of a spiritual aspect to the universe. Much apologetics (and anti-apologetics) seems to assume that every thinking person must fall into, or close to, one of those two camps.

Most people don't have that kind of certainty about everything. I certainly don't. Indeed, there's not much certainty in that 'certainly don't'. But the apologists on both sides seem to want to persuade everyone into one of the absolutes. But the weird thing is that they don't seem to target the people in the middle, they each take their aim and fire their shots at the opposing end of the bell curve.

They also target the people who are ever so slightly nearer the middle of the curve than they are. These are the folk who are not absolute believers in something, but aren't too far away. At the Christian end of things, these people are the Bible-believing Christians who have never really asked some of the big questions, but simply assume that the church's teaching is basically right. These are the people who accept the package deal of faith, without question. The goal of apologetics is to keep these people from considering to the 'wrong' sort of arguments and to keep them from shifting closer to the middle of the bell curve. At the atheist end of the curve are the non-believers who simply don't believe, but have never really considered the claims of Christianity in any significant way. A few random acts of kindness on the part of Christians could shift these people closer to the middle, so the anti-apologists seek to bolster the non-faith of these people and pull them outward.

I'm somewhere in between. Not in the middle, as I climbed off that uncomfortable fence some time ago, but certainly not near either end. Apologetics is happening all around me (mostly by my personal choice) but the arguments are just not working on me, because they're not really aiming at me.